The media and technology industry is both innovative and fast-paced, and early 2023 brought a difficult economic climate and a cost-of-living crisis.
In this episode of the Destination Cloud podcast, our hosts Alex Borland and Simon McGrath invited TVBEurope editor Jenny Priestley and Merapar’s CTO Klaus Seiler to look into their crystal ball: what they expected to see in 2023, and how it would affect media operators and broadcasters.
Inside the episode
The episode starts with money. With the cost-of-living crisis in view, Jenny Priestley expected the biggest effect to be on content production: more co-productions, and shared sports rights. From there it moves to FAST, free ad-supported streaming TV, and to release windows that were collapsing. Klaus Seiler brings it back to technology: cost, data, and teams able to experiment quickly.
The second half covers a saturated, app-led market: whether so many services are good for viewers, younger viewers watching through apps rather than linear TV, and why streamed live sport can run minutes behind broadcast. Then regulation of streamers, remote production in the cloud, and AI in production workflows and recommendation. Running through it all is discovery: with this much content, viewers have to be able to find what they want.
Highlights
- 02:29 “I think the biggest impact at the moment that we’re going to see over the next 12 months is an impact on content production.” Jenny Priestley
- 05:10 “It’s such an easy way to make money off archive content.” Jenny Priestley on FAST channels.
- 08:00 On release windows: “I would say that that’s actually completely collapsing.” Jenny Priestley
- 09:53 “It’s mainly about data and being fast in experimentation.” Klaus Seiler
- 16:35 “I can be up to two minutes behind traditional broadcast.” Jenny Priestley on watching sport via streaming.
- 25:42 A customer asked viewers who had left why they quit. Some could not find content that was on the platform all along.
Key questions answered
How would the economic climate change what gets made?
High-end TV is expensive for broadcasters and streamers alike, so Jenny Priestley expected more co-productions, citing the second season of Good Omens, co-produced by the BBC in the UK and Amazon worldwide. Sport too: BT Sport and Amazon were to share Champions League rights from the 2024–25 season, costing BT Sport its exclusivity but reducing its costs.
Why did FAST channels matter?
FAST was one of the things everyone wanted to talk about at IBC in September 2022, says Jenny Priestley, and not only for operators: content owners can put archive content in front of an audience. HBO had said it was taking shows such as Westworld off HBO Max to launch them as FAST channels. The doubt: if everyone launches one, ad revenue is split and discovery becomes the problem. Asked about the technology, Klaus Seiler puts data first: knowing whether an experiment finds its audience, and improving customer lifetime value rather than chasing subscriber numbers.
Are so many streaming apps good for viewers?
Jenny Priestley grew up with four TV channels. The choice now can be overwhelming, but more eyeballs on the TV screen means more commercial and AVOD revenue, more content and more work in the industry. Students Jenny interviewed watch through apps: “Linear isn’t for them anymore.” BBC trails point to iPlayer, and Channel 4 said it would rename its on-demand service simply Channel 4.
Why is streamed live sport behind broadcast?
Jenny Priestley argues that TV manufacturers, internet providers and broadcasters need to work together: ultra-low latency in production does not help if the final mile is not fixed. “It’s the whole chain, right?” says Klaus Seiler: CDN segments that must be downloaded and buffered, plus encoding and production. Scale is hard too: some customers had a million concurrent viewers across several European countries. Klaus did not expect latency to be solved in 2023, but to improve gradually.
Where do cloud and AI come in?
Jenny Priestley expected remote production, driven by the cloud, to continue, and traditional broadcasters that had been wary of the cloud to start trialling it. For Klaus Seiler, keeping costs down means an elastic fabric: cloud to spin channels up and bring them down again, with orchestration and automation. One of the hosts pointed to AI making video production workflows more efficient; Klaus added clipping, finding points of interest, and recommendation feeds that need good metadata.
Speakers
- Jenny Priestley, Editor, TVBEurope
- Klaus Seiler, CTO, Merapar
- Alex Borland, VP Strategy & Business Development, Merapar (host)
- Simon McGrath, VP Strategy & Portfolio, Merapar (host)
